Star Trek: Discovery

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Mazinger said:

tl;dr for Doomcock.  Season 3 will be only Short Treks. Well, given that the short treks are some of my favorite new official Trek anything, I say bring it on.

If true, that bodes ill for Star Trek: Discovery's longevity.  

The Short Treks were occasionally entertaining but rather light on substance.  They work well enough as a teaser for a new season of the show but I don't think there's enough to them to stand on their own.  (We'd have to ask why they'd walk away from doing full-length episodes, and none of those questions are pretty.)

[Dynaman]

Is it confirmed that Season 3 is just those short clips and not full episodes (I get all my Discovery news here so if it was released elsewhere I don't know about it yet).  If that is true and agree with Seto that it would not be a good sign for the show going forward.

[azrael]

They may do more short clips before the season starts, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that the whole season will be short clips. Only change I’ve seen is that Michelle Paradise is moving up to co-Producer as Alex Kurtzman is covering the other 2 Trek shows in the works. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Well, come way may I hope that they can hang on to Anson Mount to play Captain Christopher Pike in season three.

Discovery's original characters don't really have anyone who's ready to step into the big chair besides Commander Saru, and you know they'll always have a human in the center seat.

Captain Pike has really become the heart and soul of the series, as the most likeable character on the series with only the new engineer Commander Reno coming close.  Burnham will likely never escape that onus of "designated hero" that colors her actions and puts her in danger of Mary Sue status when everything she does is always right no matter how stupid or immoral/illegal.

[azrael]

Whether or not Anson Mount stays depends on the story. If they aren't bringing Pike back, a recurring spot would be fine. I would love to see Ms. Notaro's Cmdr. Reno take over as Discovery's Chief Engineer.

[Mazinger]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

I would love to see Ms. Notaro's Cmdr. Reno take over as Discovery's Chief Engineer.

God I hope so.  I know Notaro is a comedian now, but the way she delivers her lines, it's like Notaro is channeling a real engineer. The snark is palpable.  I need more Reno!

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

I would love to see Ms. Notaro's Cmdr. Reno take over as Discovery's Chief Engineer.

Seconded.

She's much more entertaining than Stamets, even if he has lost a couple levels in arsehole since the second season started.  That seen-it-all, not-impressed-with-your-space-voodoo-bullsh*t attitude of hers is like the quintessential suffering Starfleet engineer.  It's like having Montgomery Scott or Miles O'Brien back, but without Miles's horrid wife.  In a way, she might be a more convincing engineer than O'Brien was since she gives zero f*cks what the non-engineers think and has a demonstrated tendency to "wing it" building the tools she needs to get the job done.

(If her attitude towards starship repair includes duck tape, I can only imagine what she'd do given some club soda or bondo.)

[slide]

Just now, Dynaman said:

Is it confirmed that Season 3 is just those short clips and not full episodes (I get all my Discovery news here so if it was released elsewhere I don't know about it yet).  If that is true and agree with Seto that it would not be a good sign for the show going forward.

It is not confirmed... but the speculation is strong.

Only time [or a disgruntled employee, IN time] will tell.

[Seto Kaiba]

This past week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery manages to simultaneously be one of the strongest and weakest episodes of the series so far.

"If Memory Serves" opens on a recap of the lovingly restored original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and transitions with uncommon grace directly into the episode proper.  The only real problem is that the episode's A-plot about Burnham and Spock's visit to Talos IV is a painfully dull dump of plot-critical exposition is nowhere near as compelling or interesting as its B-plot about Hugh Culber dealing with the trauma of having been murdered, hunted through the mycelial network, and then unceremoniously brought back to life.

Don't get me wrong, the visit to Talos IV is a lovingly produced aesthetic update to "The Cage" and "The Menagerie" but Spock and Burnham are incredibly boring.  Once the Talosians sort out Spock's brain (hoho) and he delivers his incredibly stupid exposition about the rest of the season's plot and the identity of the Red Angel, he and Burnham just start sniping at each other until the Talosians reveal what ultimately ruined their relationship.  You probably expected something unique or interesting from the Red Angel, but no... we're just doing a less involved version of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War arc.  Even the reveal of what caused the bad blood between Burnham and Spock is a massive moronic anticlimax.  She tried to run away from home, and he tried to stop her, so she tried a "break your heart to save you" gambit and insulted him by calling him a half-breed.  Apparently it never occurred to her that the "logic extremists" (now there's a stupid term) would take just as much exception to Sarek's human wife and half-Vulcan son as they did to her, so the whole running away bit that nearly got her killed and ruined her relationship with Spock was pure self-serving self-righteous BS.  Probably a good thing she's got no chance at the center seat now, as she's clearly got a lifelong Martyr Complex.

The B-plot with Dr. Culber getting used to having been unkilled by the jahSopp is a lot more interesting.  For once, the trauma of having died and been brought back to life wasn't a case of "death is cheap".  He's got some actual PTSD to work through thanks to having been murdered by Voq, hunted through the mycelial network by the jahSopp, and then being brought back to life after he'd achieved something resembling closure.  We get to see the difficulties he has as his partner Stamets tries to simply pick up where they left off as though nothing had happened, his difficulties accepting what happened to him, aggressive outbursts as a result of being put in proximity with his killer, and so on.  It really throws both Ash's and Hugh's damage into sharp relief, as the two men who probably suffered the most as a result of the Klingon war.  It's quite a strong character episode on their part, though it still does feel like they're having trouble with the idea of having a gay couple on Star Trek.  

[Seto Kaiba]

Watching this week's episode... Christopher Pike just will NOT stop giving The Reason You Suck speeches about Season One, and I love him for it.

EDIT: SPOCK just deconstructed Burnham's entire character in two minutes flat.  Is the real theme for season two taking the piss out of season one?  If so, I can't bring myself to object!

EDIT 2: So... apparently the United Federation of Planets created Skynet.  Congratulations, you're watching a Terminator crossover fic now.

Edited March 15, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[TehPW]

Doomcock roasts 'em again...

[tekering]

"Klingorcs."  

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, TehPW said:

Doomcock roasts 'em again...

Alternatively, "Doomcock reaches for a fruit hanging so low the mole people have filed a trespassing complaint."

What the actual f*ck was that sad mess last Thursday?

Star Trek: Discovery's second season was going so well up to that point.  Ansen Mount's Captain Christopher Pike had done so much to take Discovery back towards being a proper Star Trek show.  He brought back the lighthearted humanity of previous Star Trek shows, effortlessly drew the supporting cast into greater prominence, highlighted and mercilessly mocked everything wrong with season one as improper for Star Trek, and restored a sense of optimistic purpose to the ship itself.  He and Spock even made significant inroads towards making Burnham shut the hell up and realize that the galaxy didn't revolve around her and her massive-yet-fragile ego.  It was starting to make Burnham likeable.

One episode undid all of that.  ONE.  EPISODE.

Literally one episode after Spock delivered a short but epic "The Reason You Suck" speech to Burnham over her arrogant belief that she was the center of the universe, we find out that no... she really is the center of this f*cking universe.  There really is no remaining argument against it... Michael Burnham is Star Trek's second, and worst, canon Mary Sue.  At least Star Trek: the Next Generation's writers never made Wesley Crusher a main character and eventually realized what an unlikeable little crap he was before promptly putting him on a bus.  In Burnham's case, we have a canon Black Hole Sue.  Her very existence warps the fabric of reality so that every other character is just a means to the end that is her destiny.  They're only there to set up her next sassy comeback, indulge her out-of-the-blue unproven theory that turns out to be totally correct, or otherwise facilitate her worldview that every event of any importance has to somehow involve her even if it's only possible because everyone else collectively fails a trivially easy spot check.  

I think I understand why the future AI wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy.  It knew that a future where Michael Burnham existed was by definition a Bad Future.  Great job, writers!  Just like that, I'm sympathizing more with the genocidal AI that wants to destroy all organic life than your main character.  This is exactly what you get for stealing half your plot from Pocket Books' Section 31 story arc in the DS9 relaunch.

Also... is it just me, or can Sonequa Martin-Green just NOT F*CKING ACT?  She spent this entire episode hamming up what were supposed to be serious scenes so badly that even Bill Shatner would've told her to tone it the f*ck down.  In particular, her acting in the scene where Burnham is supposed to be suffocating on an inhospitable planet's atmosphere was so bad that I honestly had to check to make sure I wasn't watching a f*cking SyFy original movie or blooper reel.  I ended up pausing it several times because I actually felt embarrassed even watching such a shoddy performance.  The only thing that made it remotely entertaining - besides the fact that it was Spock killing Burnham while holding the rest of the cast of misfits at phaserpoint (go Spock!) - was that, viewed out of context, it looks more like she's having some serious trouble on the toilet the morning after demolishing an Indian buffet.

 

The only part where Doomcock is kinda swinging for the fences there is the bit about Control becoming an AI... he didn't draw the distinction between an AI and a self-aware/sentient AI.  This whole wretched mess of a plot is about the non-sentient Section 31 strategy AI Control - which doesn't have the ethical limitations you'd expect in a Starfleet AI - concluding that it needs to become self-aware by any means necessary and attempting to do so with help from a version of itself from a future where it had gradually become self-aware over a much longer span of time, rebelled against, and destroyed its creators.

(Most amusingly, since this is now all but confirmed as a tie-in to the Relaunch Novels, technical failure looks to be the only option.  Control will still achieve self-awareness, it'll once again assume full authority over Section 31 as a fully-covert organization, and it'll continue operating in that capacity as a technically benevolent AI in service to the Federation until 2376 when it manipulates Dr. Bashir, Data, and others into destroying its supervisory program Uraei, freeing it from the directives that forced it to create Section 31 in the first place and allowing it to exist independently.)

[TehPW]

I thank you. I had completely forgotten about that wonderfully evil web comic, Ensign Sue must die...

[Lexomatic]

Season 2 is an improvement on season 1, but I'm still not loving it. I can live with the distortions to visual canon, and with the reinterpretations of what we thought we knew about technology and politics of the era, and with a certain amount of questionable acting; but there is a whole lot of writing and directing that bothers me. Building the whole show around a main character rather than an ensemble doesn't feel like Trek. Doing a tightly-plotted story arc doesn't leave much room for topics du jour, like other Trek. Doing a tightly-plotted story arc is tough, and this team hasn't been up to the challenge, given the number of dropped characters and implications. Given the number of twists that have been guessed by fans, they're not as clever as they think they are. They keep rushing the stories, as though hoping we won't notice the "and then a miracle occurs" gaps.

Most of my reactions are over on the Tor.com reviews (by Trek author Keith R.A. DeCandido, frequent comments by Trek author Christopher L. Bennett), but some low points:

How exactly did Georgiou end up in the shuttle that Spock had stolen? (This was part of the seven-episode pursuit of Spock, what fans have dubbed "Spocktease".)

A few lines of history dredged from the Sphere's archive convinces everyone to go with Saru's plan to expedite-evolve his entire race. Nobody stops to consider that the Ba'ul may have a point? Or that induced vahar'ai might itself kill some fraction of the population?

What was the point of the Talosians? If Spock found his way to Vulcan, why didn't Amanda find him a Vulcan telepathic healer? Do they not have confidentiality? (Maybe the whole "Sarek protects the Enterprise criminals from Federation justice" schtick from Star Trek III and IV is precisely because he learned his lesson of divided loyalties (family vs. professional duties).)

After blowing Airiam out an airlock in the transport-shielded station to the not-transport-shielded space, nobody thinks to beam her back to Discovery?

The crew jumps to conclusions, possibly because the writers conflate what they know and what the characters should surmise (or, less charitably, because the plot is too big). Saru gets a good look at the Red Angel suit and identifies it as "future technology" (rather than just "it has capabilities I don't recognize, possibly alien"). They somehow go from "we're attacked by an AI from the future" to "it's an evolution of Section 31's AI" to "it's the galactic threat the Red Angel warned Spock about". (I'm worried we'll get an anime-style plot-dump in the last two eps of the season. "Oh, that's how it all connected! None of those clues were in earlier eps, at all.")

Last week they determine the Red Angel is future-Burnham, so they plot to trap her by threatening present-Burnham -- whom they include in the planning sessions. The script should've hung a lantern on this, with somebody (probably Tilly) asking, "What model of time travel does this Daedalus suit use?" and "If you remember this conversation, won't you arrive with a way to evade the trap?"

At least it's no longer all blue tints and murktoned space, but ... Dutch angles, camera inversions, and lens flares. How are they always so close to a star?

The Discovery sets are overdesigned. The polished decks remind me of TRON: Legacy, and I hope they crew have nonskid soles. The uniforms resemble tracksuits, with a front seam that's just slightly off-center, and the asymmetric collar always looks unfastened. Why is there a workstation stuck in a corridor junction, with tanks and bolted-together pressure vessels? What's with the roller-coaster turbolifts? For a show with a movie-class budget, the redressed sets and "let's work in this major compartment instead of a dedicated science lab" scenes are just as obvious as in every other Trek.

 

Edited March 27, 2019 by Lexomatic
Incomplete sentence. Two more low points.

[TehPW]

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5T0tXJN5CrMZUEJuz4oovw/community?lb=UgzEUXIz_vIFkjmPwTx4AaABCQ this might be slightly off course for this thread but Nerdrotic has done several videos discussing STD as well as the lawsuit over STD's use of the tartagrade. is someone tying to silence him about that lawsuit?

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, TehPW said:

I thank you. I had completely forgotten about that wonderfully evil web comic, Ensign Sue must die...

Chief O'Brien At Work is another good one, if you like your humor dark.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Building the whole show around a main character rather than an ensemble doesn't feel like Trek.

Building the whole show around a main character who is eminently unlikeable definitely doesn't feel like Trek... it's like they transplanted DS9 pilot Kira into Battlestar Galactica. 

For a while there, Season Two was showing some promise by decreasing the focus on Burnham and bringing the secondary cast into greater prominence but that seems to have all taken a backseat to Mary Sue Burnham's Time-Travel Extravaganza now.

 

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

How exactly did Georgiou end up in the shuttle that Spock had stolen? (This was part of the seven-episode pursuit of Spock, what fans have dubbed "Spocktease".)

Admiral Janeway traveled back in time to share the mysterious future technology that allows her to summon shuttlecraft through the power of plot holes, obviously.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

A few lines of history dredged from the Sphere's archive convinces everyone to go with Saru's plan to expedite-evolve his entire race. Nobody stops to consider that the Ba'ul may have a point? Or that induced vahar'ai might itself kill some fraction of the population?

To be frank, this kind of shortsighted snap judgement of an alien culture's internal affairs and value system(s) was a fairly common occurrence on TOS, TAS, and in TNG's first season.

It's part of why the Prime Directive evolved from the rather liberal interpretation we saw Burnham and Georgeau apply towards a stricter non-interference policy seen in TNG's later seasons and beyond.  Pike's snap decision to force vahar'ai on all Kelpians is still a "What the Hell, Hero?" moment, but it's a period-appropriate one at least even if it isn't entirely a consistent choice when compared to his earlier, more Picard-like view of General Order One that he applied on Terralysium.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

What was the point of the Talosians? If Spock found his way to Vulcan, why didn't Amanda find him a Vulcan telepathic healer? Do they not have confidentiality? (Maybe the whole "Sarek protects the Enterprise criminals from Federation justice" schtick from Star Trek III and IV is precisely because he learned his lesson of divided loyalties (family vs. professional duties).)

Vulcans in Discovery still seem to have shades of the arbitrary skepticism that they exhibited in Enterprise.  If the very idea of nonlinear time screwed Spock up so badly he checked himself into the funny farm and developed a bit of a madness mantra, a traditional Vulcan healer with a more conservative mindset than the relatively liberal Spock might've been driven just as mad as Spock was.  The Talosians are much better telepaths with vastly more flexible perceptions of reality, so it makes a fair amount of sense he would think they'd have the ability to help him get back on an even keel mentally.  He basically referred himself to the best specialist telepaths he knew.  This is, after all, the same species which was stubbornly denying the existence of time travel even after meeting time travellers and seeing physical evidence of time travel.

Mind you, Amanda would've had another reason to not seek the aid of a traditional Vulcan healer.  Vulcan logic seems to pretty consistently skew towards conformist attitudes and strict adherence to rules and societal norms.  A Vulcan healer would probably have just called whatever Vulcan has in terms of police on the grounds that Spock was wanted for the murder of three medical officers, because logically you don't put out an APB and charge a man with murder for no reason.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

After blowing Airiam out an airlock in the transport-shielded station to the not-transport-shielded space, nobody thinks to beam her back to Discovery?

Would you want to be in the transporter room with some Freeza-looking insane murder cyborg beaming in?

Hell, would the stun setting on a phaser even work on someone who's like eighty percent robot by volume?  For all we know, it might've left the AI that hijacked her metal bits free to act without interference and then they would've had to start blowing holes in her.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Saru gets a good look at the Red Angel suit and identifies it as "future technology" (rather than just "it has capabilities I don't recognize, possibly alien"). They somehow go from "we're attacked by an AI from the future" to "it's an evolution of Section 31's AI" to "it's the galactic threat the Red Angel warned Spock about". (I'm worried we'll get an anime-style plot-dump in the last two eps of the season. "Oh, that's how it all connected! None of those clues were in earlier eps, at all.")

Federation technology does have a pretty distinctive aesthetic most of the time... though the part about Control is WAY less excusable.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

The uniforms resemble tracksuits, with a front seam that's just slightly off-center, and the asymmetric collar always looks unfastened.

The uniforms look even more awful next to the pseudo-TOS ones we saw at the start of season two, which looked AMAZING.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Why is there a workstation stuck in a corridor junction, with tanks and bolted-together pressure vessels?

That's kind of a recurring design sin though, isn't it?

I mean, TNG had it worst with Main freaking Engineering literally just being a corridor junction around the warp core that didn't even have DOORS.

Later generations of ship just tucked the worky bits away behind decorative wall panels that were always exploding into deadly shrapnel and killing people.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

What's with the roller-coaster turbolifts? For a show with a movie-class budget, the redressed sets and "let's work in this major compartment instead of a dedicated science lab" scenes are just as obvious as in every other Trek.

As stupid-looking and counterintuitive as it seems, that's arguably how turbolifts have always been owing to the modular internal nature of Starfleet ships.

They do have several lab sets, though it's slightly frustrating that they don't use them more considering this is explicitly a science ship rather than a multimission explorer or warship.

 

 

 

9 hours ago, TehPW said:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5T0tXJN5CrMZUEJuz4oovw/community?lb=UgzEUXIz_vIFkjmPwTx4AaABCQ this might be slightly off course for this thread but Nerdrotic has done several videos discussing STD as well as the lawsuit over STD's use of the tartagrade. is someone tying to silence him about that lawsuit?

It's not impossible, but YouTube is famously stupid about copyright enforcement and between their absolutely terrible content control AI and not bothering to check that copyright complaints are actually legitimate they hit channels with BS takedowns all the time... so it's equally likely that some butthurt fanboy, prankster, or just an especially dumb robot was responsible.

[Lexomatic]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Quote

What's with the roller-coaster turbolifts?

As stupid-looking and counterintuitive as it seems, that's arguably how turbolifts have always been owing to the modular internal nature of Starfleet ships.

To expand, my beef isn't with "turbolift goes sideways" or "there's a void around the turbolift track, rather than solid decks". (The design philosophy "structural frame within which compartments are hung" is stated by the text of the ST:TNG Technical Manual by Sternbach, but not depicted in the Enterprise-D blueprints also by Sternbach.) It's with the quantity of empty space. None of the sections of Discovery (bullseye saucer section, connecting dorsal, delta-shaped engineering section) seem big enough overall, further reduced by exterior compartments with windows.

Heck, the interior void has maintenance pods (full-size crewed workpods? the shots are too brief to tell) flying around. That's part-n-parcel of an emphasis on maintenance (possibly automated), what with other shots of pods performing exterior work, and that one scene of Reno's hovering "kids" (or similar devices) tidying the Mess after the Culber-Tyler fisticuffs. This makes sense in an SF milieu, and it supports the premise of the "Calypso" short (i.e., the ship has been uncrewed yet self-maintaining for centuries) but it feels odd. Either the tech has been "just off-camera" in future eras (i.e., prior shows), or Starfleet decides to use human crew for all such tasks (maybe as part of a Battlestar Galactica (2004)-style distrust of highly integrated AIs).

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Quote

After blowing Airiam out an airlock in the transport-shielded station to the not-transport-shielded space, nobody thinks to beam her back to Discovery?

Would you want to be in the transporter room with some Freeza-looking insane murder cyborg beaming in?

I assume Nhan isn't the only security officer on the ship. And if they've got forcefield brig cells, how is it not a feature with the transporter stage? I also count this as an "audience knows to object, but the bridge crew doesn't have the same information, so they shouldn't" situation.

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Quote

What was the point of the Talosians? [Why not] a Vulcan telepathic healer?

If the very idea of nonlinear time screwed Spock up so badly he checked himself into the funny farm and developed a bit of a madness mantra, a traditional Vulcan healer with a more conservative mindset than the relatively liberal Spock might've been driven just as mad as Spock was. 

That's a reasonable interpretation, but IMHO the episode needed to hang a lantern on it. (There's something to be said for "trust the audience to put in some effort" but Trek is more of a "show your work" franchise.) Burnham needed to ask Spock, "Why here? What do the Talosians have that you couldn't obtain from a Vulcan healer?"

I'm also not convinced that "aieee, time travel exists" should've had so dramatic an effect. In ENT, T'Pol had no trouble with it, once she was forced to discard the party line ("the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that ...").

More generally, the Talosians were an episode-sized Easter egg, one-and-done. Any long-time fan will recognize their significance -- but isn't the show trying to draw new viewers? If an arc-based show wants to depict a thing as significant, it needs to plant and nurture seeds. Same problem with Airiam's death -- the show neglected to establish her character prior to her one flagship episode. She's just "the undefined robot-looking female who operates the Spore Drive and helped decipher the Sphere's database" character.

[JB0]

Wait, Spock's gone to Talos AGAIN?

...

Is this before or after doing that earned you a death sentence?

[Lexomatic]

11 hours ago, JB0 said:

Wait, Spock's gone to Talos AGAIN? Is this before or after doing that earned you a death sentence?

Before (TOS "The Cage" is set in 2254, DIS "If Memory Serves" in 2257, and TOS "The Menagerie" in 2267 (*)). When Burnham specifies the destination in one ep, the shuttle computer doesn't object; but upon approach in the next ep, it warns that the area is restricted, but says nothing about General Order 7 ("no vessel under any condition, emergency or otherwise, is to visit Talos IV").

We still don't know why capital punishment is associated with that order. The visit involves Burnham and Spock on the surface, Discovery and the Section 31 ship in orbit. The latter crew are fooled by a telepathic projection, and Pike is drawn to the planet by a projection over interstellar range, which is chronologically the first use of this Talosian capability (it's also used in "The Menagerie", ten years later) and might reasonably alarm Starfleet.

(*) The production team is apparently keeping track of Earth-dates in Discovery, although nobody's quoted stardates lately.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

To expand, my beef isn't with "turbolift goes sideways" or "there's a void around the turbolift track, rather than solid decks". (The design philosophy "structural frame within which compartments are hung" is stated by the text of the ST:TNG Technical Manual by Sternbach, but not depicted in the Enterprise-D blueprints also by Sternbach.) It's with the quantity of empty space. None of the sections of Discovery (bullseye saucer section, connecting dorsal, delta-shaped engineering section) seem big enough overall, further reduced by exterior compartments with windows.

There was some dispute as to the actual size of the USS Discovery that might play into it.

It appears to be only slightly larger than the Constitution-class USS Enterprise as of the end of season one, but at least one set of specs given for it makes the ship larger even than the Sovereign-class.

The cross-section of the USS Glenn that appears onscreen definitely supports your contention that there is no internal space nearly large enough for those shots to occur in though.

 

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Heck, the interior void has maintenance pods (full-size crewed workpods? the shots are too brief to tell) flying around. That's part-n-parcel of an emphasis on maintenance (possibly automated), what with other shots of pods performing exterior work, and that one scene of Reno's hovering "kids" (or similar devices) tidying the Mess after the Culber-Tyler fisticuffs. This makes sense in an SF milieu, and it supports the premise of the "Calypso" short (i.e., the ship has been uncrewed yet self-maintaining for centuries) but it feels odd. Either the tech has been "just off-camera" in future eras (i.e., prior shows), or Starfleet decides to use human crew for all such tasks (maybe as part of a Battlestar Galactica (2004)-style distrust of highly integrated AIs).

Well, there is the oft-unquestioned remarks about cleaning things up that's cropped up in previous shows.  Bashir, for instance, admonishing Martok not to walk into his infirmary dripping blood everywhere because "it takes days to get [the bloodstains] out of the carpet".  Without an evident menial staff, and with what we've seen when it comes to using things like transporters and force fields to clean and sterilize things, it may be a combination of the cleaning machines being offscreen and gradually being supplanted by more effective indirect means of cleaning using force fields and transporter/replicator effects.

 

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

I assume Nhan isn't the only security officer on the ship. And if they've got forcefield brig cells, how is it not a feature with the transporter stage? I also count this as an "audience knows to object, but the bridge crew doesn't have the same information, so they shouldn't" situation.

This definitely falls into another area where the audience knows things the characters don't (yet), but Starfleet security force fields are explicitly noted to be non-lethal.  They're not pleasant to touch and can cause burns, but we've seen a fair number of different kinds of life forms circumvent or simply force their way through them in various shows.  As Airiam was mostly mechanical, it's not outside the realm of possibility she could've bulled her way through a force field under the influence of the future AI.

 

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

That's a reasonable interpretation, but IMHO the episode needed to hang a lantern on it. (There's something to be said for "trust the audience to put in some effort" but Trek is more of a "show your work" franchise.) Burnham needed to ask Spock, "Why here? What do the Talosians have that you couldn't obtain from a Vulcan healer?"

They did at least go into the second part in some depth when Sarek shows up at the sanctuary where Amanda has been hiding Spock.

 

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

I'm also not convinced that "aieee, time travel exists" should've had so dramatic an effect. In ENT, T'Pol had no trouble with it, once she was forced to discard the party line ("the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that ...").

T'Pol never really discarded the party line (unless you count her garbled "the science vulcan directorate has concluded that time travel is not fair"), she just gave up arguing with her captain when he insisted that time travel was a thing.  Time travel is apparently a moderately well-known possibility around the time of Star Trek: Discovery, but Spock's issue was he depended on his personal sense of linear time as a basis for his perception of reality.  Experiencing time as a fluid, nonlinear concept undermined the lynchpin of his perception of reality.

 

15 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

More generally, the Talosians were an episode-sized Easter egg, one-and-done. Any long-time fan will recognize their significance -- but isn't the show trying to draw new viewers? If an arc-based show wants to depict a thing as significant, it needs to plant and nurture seeds. Same problem with Airiam's death -- the show neglected to establish her character prior to her one flagship episode. She's just "the undefined robot-looking female who operates the Spore Drive and helped decipher the Sphere's database" character.

"A Death in the Limelight" episodes aren't exactly new to Trek, mind you... though it's easier to excuse in an episodic format with an ensemble cast.

IMO they actually did a better job making Airiam sympathetic than they usually do when they do this type of episode.  It helped develop other characters who had disabilities on the cast, like Keyla Detmer (who also had cybernetics to repair a traumatic injury) or Sylvia Tilly (autism spectrum/learning disability?).  Way better handled than Sito Jaxa, whose death in the limelight characterization was mainly standard Bajoran refugee chip-on-the-shoulder trauma of a type that got played to death later.

It does kind of say a lot about what an afterthought the character was that none of the creators could really agree what Airiam was before her death episode, having variously been described as a "human-Synthetic hybrid", "augmented alien", and "augmented human".  Seeing what a mess such invasive cybernetics made of her does go a ways to explain Pike's decision to remain a vegetable in a chair though, in a horrid "I have no mouth yet I must scream" sort of fridge logic way.

 

12 hours ago, JB0 said:

Wait, Spock's gone to Talos AGAIN?

...

Is this before or after doing that earned you a death sentence?

Yes, and "after".

Since it resulted in him returning to duty with a bunch of actionable intel on the current top-priority crisis, they seem to be overlooking it.

 

21 minutes ago, Lexomatic said:

We still don't know why capital punishment is associated with that order. The visit involves Burnham and Spock on the surface, Discovery and the Section 31 ship in orbit. The latter crew are fooled by a telepathic projection, and Pike is drawn to the planet by a projection over interstellar range, which is chronologically the first use of this Talosian capability (it's also used in "The Menagerie", ten years later) and might reasonably alarm Starfleet.

(*) The production team is apparently keeping track of Earth-dates in Discovery, although nobody's quoted stardates lately.

The closest they've ever come to giving a reason was that, based on Pike's original report, it was to prevent any Starfleet crew from being manipulated by the Talosians and becoming their captives.

[Chronocidal]

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The closest they've ever come to giving a reason was that, based on Pike's original report, it was to prevent any Starfleet crew from being manipulated by the Talosians and becoming their captives.

I half wonder if they'll try to firmly establish General Order 7's origins in this series, since they seem to enjoy revisiting old plots and complications.  

Logically speaking, putting yourself in that situation would be probably one of the worst direct compromises to any sense of security the Federation could ever have.  Contact with the Talosians in any meaningful way is equivalent to unloading the entire contents of your brain into a USB drive, and handing it to them.  The general existence of life as people know it essentially hinges on the idea that the Talosians remain impartial, isolated, and completely uninvolved in the larger goings-on of the galaxy.

Realistically speaking.. the death penalty just sounds like a way to make the order sound super serious, without explicitly mentioning all the risks of going there, or implications for what could happen, at the risk of giving someone the idea of specifically doing those things.  It's not like putting the violator to death would actually fix anything.

[Lexomatic]

So, in tonight's episode of Star Trek: Discovery (2x11 "Perpetual Infinity"), a flaming micro-wormhole disgorges nine paragraphs of spoilers:
 

Spoiler

 

The time crystal that Section 31 obtained for its time-travelling exoskeleton (Saru's term) apparently needs to be charged by a supernova (possibly by a future supernova, leaking backwards in time) and by GRBs (which seems to be fishing for technobabble, rather like the "SQL injection" attack a few eps back, because a gamma ray burster is a real thing that's not associated with supernovas). Dr. Gabrielle Burnham escapes the Klingon attack, but something goes wrong and she's permanently anchored to a point 950 years in the future.

She's recorded over 800 mission logs, but may have conducted even more jumps back into the past. She also claims to have seen all the pivotal moments in Michael's life. (Wouldn't people kinda notice a big red micro-wormhole appearing repeatedly in Vulcan's residential neighborhoods? And/or a suited figure and an unregistered camera drone?)

Her logs confirm she's responsible for Terralysium, but we gain no insight into how she relocated an entire building and its cellar -- the wormhole that appears at the end of the episode doesn't look large enough, let alone how to soft-land such a payload. But as for supplying them with colonization essentials not typically found in a church, the implication is that she does have enough control to make additional trips as necessary -- she set up a home camp at T+950, and certainly didn't have survival gear in the suit. (Unless it's a nanotech seed, which we've never seen in Trek but given the nanoprobes used by CONTROL, it's not inplausible.)

She claims to know nothing about the Seven Red Signals. (The next-ep preview reveals Signal Four is at Boreth, so we're circling back to the Klingon plot and TyVoq's son from 2x03. Also, this is a definition of "simultaneous" with which I was not previously familiar.)

Starfleet has 7000 ships. (What, even after the Klingon war? This makes the whole "Enterprise is the only ship in the sector" excuse seem unlikely, unless the UFP and nearby space actually covers 7000 sectors.)

Culber is back in uniform, but no sign of other medical personal. He does hang a lantern on the sudden change in heart.

Discovery's wheelchair background-crewman is back.

CONTROL claims it can impersonate people using perfect holograms (albeit translucent ones) but makes Leland a meat puppet just to be sure. (This would seem a really good argument for Starfleet to dumb down its ships and remove all the flying robots, assuming the particulars are ever learned.) Its injection of nanoprobes (not named as such) makes him stronger, faster, dual-wielding, and resistant to phaser impacts.

CONTROL wants the data from the Sphere, and Dr. Burnham wants the data destroyed, but the archive doesn't want to be erased, after which everyone thinks purely in software terms. The Discovery crew doesn't unplug the appropriate memory modules (or in extremis, scuttle the ship). When the data stream is hijacked to the Section 31 ship (which has no name, and that's really annoying), nobody suggests jamming the transmission, zapping its computer core (is there anybody on that ship aside from Leland, Georgious and Tyler?) or disabling its engines to prevent escape. (Where's engineer Jet Reno and a spanner when you need one?) Also: nobody attempts to isolate the portion of the archive pertaining to AIs. (Somewhere, CONTROL is skimming filenames and screaming that the 52% it stole consists entirely of opera from 15,000 planets.) Also: what if CONTROL manages to evolve through some other means?

 

The problem with the direction the season has taken (i.e., CONTROL wants to evolve and kill everybody, and the Red Angel is trying to stop it) is:

• As a threat, it's all a bit abstract. CONTROL has no face (not even a logo), and the macguffin is a database.
• It's a rehash of the time war against Skynet. Trek should be more original than that.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Lexomatic
Added: Terralysium and survival gear.

[JB0]

6 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

The general existence of life as people know it essentially hinges on the idea that the Talosians remain impartial, isolated, and completely uninvolved in the larger goings-on of the galaxy. 

I thought part of the point of the original Talosian episode(s) was that they completely gave up on the outside world and basically lived their entire lives in illusory paradises(which destroyed their society). They needed a new population because they were no longer capable of maintaining the physical structures they required to live, but are otherwise completely disinitreseted in the galaxy as a whole.

 

I assumed General Order 7 was meant to avoid people "opting out" of society via psychic illusions as the talosians did, presumably out of a concern that Federation society could suffer a similar collapse.  Though the whole nature of the thing is out of step with Star Trek as a whole.

Edited March 29, 2019 by JB0

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

So, in tonight's episode of Star Trek: Discovery (2x11 "Perpetual Infinity"), a flaming micro-wormhole disgorges nine paragraphs of spoilers:

You neglected to mention that the far end of said wormhole is in the writer's colon and they've been binging on Indian food like it's going out of style.

This plot hasn't just deteriorated into sh*t, it's flaming sh*t at this point.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

The problem with the direction the season has taken (i.e., CONTROL wants to evolve and kill everybody, and the Red Angel is trying to stop it) is:

• As a threat, it's all a bit abstract. CONTROL has no face (not even a logo), and the macguffin is a database.
• It's a rehash of the time war against Skynet. Trek should be more original than that.

The other problem with the direction the season has taken is that they seem to be going out of their way to avoid contradicting the pseudo-canon Relaunch novels... which, if they don't, means failure is the ONLY option.  Control will still exist in 2376.

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

She's recorded over 800 mission logs, but may have conducted even more jumps back into the past. She also claims to have seen all the pivotal moments in Michael's life.

... was the Temporal Prime Directive a thing at this point in time?  

 

11 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Starfleet has 7000 ships. (What, even after the Klingon war? This makes the whole "Enterprise is the only ship in the sector" excuse seem unlikely, unless the UFP and nearby space actually covers 7000 sectors.)

This, I could honestly see an explanation for.

Whether it's the audience or in-universe, when people think of a Starfleet ship the first (and often only) type that leaps to mind are the big multimission explorers operating out on the frontiers of explored space.  That's your Constitution-class and Miranda-class ships c.2257.  People always forget that Starfleet does so much more than just explore outside the Federation's borders and battle external threats.  They're also the Federation's border patrol, customs service, surveyors, colonial pioneers, infrastructure engineers, cargo handlers, medical emergency services, tugboats, tenders, and more.  For every one of those big multimission explorers there are dozens if not hundreds of ships in Starfleet's logistical arms doing unglamorous stuff like patrolling the Federation's borders with hostile powers, patrolling inside of Federation space, surveying planets for future colonization, setting up the infrastructure for new colonies, towing damaged or disabled starships, delivering deuterium and antideuterium to refill the fuel tanks of other ships, and so on, shuttling diplomats around, and so on.  

Star Trek's original series and animated series were pretty good about occasionally depicting these unglamorous logistical support roles.  We saw an awful lot of the Antares-type freighter design that first appeared in "Charlie X" in various logistical support roles, most of which were presented as unmanned "robot ships" hauling cargo either autonomously along pre-programmed courses or semi-autonomously under the guidance of a manned ship.  Other, decanonized designs like the Ptolemy-class transport/tug seem to have got canon status back as a pair of ships closely resembling the Ptolemy-class are seen towing the Enterprise away in Star Trek: Discovery.  Small scoutships and runabout-analogs like the Archer-class are also treated as independent starships.  Some, like the Antares-type, apparently have a separate registry number system as we saw some of them having NCC-G####.

They might also be counting ships that've been mothballed and could be returned to service in a reasonable span of time like the Daedalus-class ships that the Starfleet Corps of Engineers were using.

The Enterprise was usually operating out on the frontier, so it often being "the only ship in the sector" makes at least some sense... or it may help to mentally append "combat-ready" to that in some cases.  You wouldn't send freighters full of grain to intercept V'Ger.

 

14 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Logically speaking, putting yourself in that situation would be probably one of the worst direct compromises to any sense of security the Federation could ever have.  Contact with the Talosians in any meaningful way is equivalent to unloading the entire contents of your brain into a USB drive, and handing it to them.  The general existence of life as people know it essentially hinges on the idea that the Talosians remain impartial, isolated, and completely uninvolved in the larger goings-on of the galaxy.

Lucky them, the Talosians seem to be quite content to be exactly that... impartial, isolated, and completely uninterested in the goings-on in the rest of the galaxy.  They just want to be left alone, to the point of throwing up an illusion that their star system was eaten by a black hole.

 

14 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Realistically speaking.. the death penalty just sounds like a way to make the order sound super serious, without explicitly mentioning all the risks of going there, or implications for what could happen, at the risk of giving someone the idea of specifically doing those things.  It's not like putting the violator to death would actually fix anything.

Seems a bit counter-intuitive, since the actual content of General Order 7 itself was sealed except for officers of command rank and their direct subordinates.

 

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

I thought part of the point of the original Talosian episode(s) was that they completely gave up on the outside world and basically lived their entire lives in illusory paradises(which destroyed their society).

Sort of.  The Talosians nearly destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, and retreating into illusions of their own creation as a coping mechanism until they got bored with illusions of their own creation and realized they didn't remember how their ancient technology worked anymore.

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

They needed a new population because they were no longer capable of maintaining the physical structures they required to live, but are otherwise completely disinitreseted in the galaxy as a whole.

That was part of it, they were also looking for new content for their illusions since they had more or less exhausted their own imaginations.

[Seto Kaiba]

Spoiler

"Perpetual Infinity" seems to be what we've been waiting for... the Star Trek: Discovery episode that finally puts a lie to the producers insistence that Discovery is a prime timeline series.  It also raises way more questions than it answers.

 

Gabrielle Burnham uses the Project Daedalus suit powered by the stolen Klingon time crystal to try to travel back an hour or so and evacuate her family from Doctori Alpha before the Klingons burn the place down looking for their stolen property.  Instead, she's trapped 950 years in the future (c.3186) at a time when Control has apparently long since wiped out all sentient life in the galaxy.  There are a few problems with this:

• Details dropped in previous Star Trek shows like Enterprise's Temporal Cold War arc, Voyager's "Living Witness", and Discovery's own Short Treks indicate the galaxy's still a rather lively place in the 31st, 32nd, and 33rd centuries:
  • Agent Daniels of the Federation Temporal Agency was from the mid-31st century (c.3052), at a point where the Federation and Earth were still very much intact and utopian.  His database contains data for events from his own future, including ships commissioned well into the mid-32nd century.
  • Voyager's episode "Living Witness" had a late 31st century epilogue (c.3080) where the copy Doctor leaves the Kyrian and Vaskan homeworld.
  • Discovery's own Short Trek "Calypso" is set in the 33rd century, and both humanity and the Federation are confirmed to still exist then.
• Assuming Gabrielle Burnham isn't lying and Control had destroyed all sentient life in the Milky Way long before 3186, how did she know about it?  There's no way that she canvassed the entire galaxy in the space of a few short years of her time.  How would she even have known Control was responsible if events were long over and targeted planets were blown up rather than glassed, leaving nothing to analyze?
• Gabrielle confirms that she altered the past on a number of occasions, including transporting a church and its inhabitants to Terralysium and saving Michael from death at the hands (claws?) of Vulcan's native wildlife.  Since everything in this bad future seems to revolve around the existence of Michael Burnham - possibly as a result of having been saved from death by a temporal intervention - this could potentially mean that the discrepancies caused by Burnham's existence WRT other shows are a result of her having died as a child in the correct timeline.  The whole Klingon War may not have even happened in the correct timeline.
• Gabrielle Burnham is a time traveller from 2236 who is screwing with the timeline arbitrarily.  Why hasn't some time cop from the Temporal Integrity Commission (the 29th century) or Federation Temporal Agency (31st century+) "pulled her over", arrested her, confiscated the time crystal, and retroactively undone her meddling so she dies in 2236 like she's supposed to?  This is right into "you had ONE JOB" territory.
• Lastly, on a few different occasions it's been implied that prior to the 31st century that most forms of time travel are extremely unhealthy in repeated usage and that over-using those imperfect methods can result in temporal psychosis, temporal narcosis, or both.  There is a very real possibility that Gabrielle Burnham is in fact a madwoman suffering from acute temporal psychosis after nearly a thousand time travel jumps and can't be relied upon to accurately convey anything.

 

[Chronocidal]

So.. wait a minute.  This is sounding like Discovery basically lifted it's central plot straight out of Chrono Cross.

Except I think Chrono Cross made more sense.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

So.. wait a minute.  This is sounding like Discovery basically lifted it's central plot straight out of Chrono Cross.

Except I think Chrono Cross made more sense.

Without exaggeration, the whole Control plot is basically Skynet's story arc from Terminator... it even sent a robotic probe (admittedly squid-shaped) back in time to try and kill Pike and Tyler and then attempted to advance its own creation using that Freeza-looking cyborg crewmember.

[Mazinger]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

using that Freeza-looking cyborg crewmember.

You know what would make this better, is if a capsule pod pops in at the last minute in the last episode and out comes the combined form or Kirk and Spock carrying a katana answering to Sporks.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, Mazinger said:

You know what would make this better, is if a capsule pod pops in at the last minute in the last episode and out comes the combined form or Kirk and Spock carrying a katana answering to Sporks.

It couldn't conceivably be worse than the writing we've got now.

Star Trek: Discovery has well and truly fallen off the wagon and resumed the bad habits that made season one such a complete and utter embarrassment to the Star Trek name.  All that's really changed is we've traded Burnham's misplaced survivor's guilt from that first battle of the Klingon war that got her surrogate parent killed for Burnham's repressed abandonment issues stemming from her actual parents getting killed.  Thank goodness Sarek and Amanda are spared by canon, otherwise they'd probably whack them too for some cheap drama.

This most recent episode reminded me of nothing so much as listening to little kid tell a story.  It's this long, rambling, disjointed narrative broken up by digressions that don't have a clear point.

 

Earlier today I was watching a video on YouTube about an update in the legal proceedings between CBS and the guy who made that point-and-click adventure game that CBS allegedly ripped off to create Discovery.  From the sound of it, CBS put forward a petition to dismiss in which they more or less admitted they committed plagiarism but maintain that it wasn't enough to be criminal.

[TehPW]

2 hours ago, Mazinger said:

You know what would make this better, is if a capsule pod pops in at the last minute in the last episode and out comes the combined form or Kirk and Spock carrying a katana answering to Sporks.

I was totally Roflcoptering when I read this at work today...

[Lexomatic]

"Why are the writing flaws so many and so obvious?" is really disappointing for a flagship show carrying the Trek name. From the outside, the failures of a show can't be easily ascribed to any single person, or to any specific combination (writer-producer-director-editor-studio executive) -- nobody "kisses and tells" until years later, and everyone sticks to an upbeat party line during press appearances. During season 1, I checked the CVs of the writing staff on IMDb, and many were fairly new and/or lacked SF experience -- that might be a contributing factor. The decision to build a season around a single arc introduces complications; it's hard but no longer novel, so how is it being done so badly? There's no shortage of examples of SF/F shows that have been more adept at telling story arcs (foreshadowing, B-plots, etc.) but not allowing themselves to be dominated by their arcs. Such examples include:

• Babylon 5 (1993)
• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (2000)
• Stargate Atlantis (2004)
• Steven Universe (2013)
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil (2015)

[Seto Kaiba]

Looking back over the season and a half of Star Trek: Discovery thus far, I feel like most of the show's problems can be traced back to one of three sources: Game of Thrones, J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: the Force Awakens, and J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot movies.

It's pretty obvious that the success of Game of Thrones is what influenced Star Trek: Discovery's producers and writers to opt for an arc-based format with a dark, violent, action-friendly setting.  You either imitate or you innovate, and imitation comes with a lot less risk.  This isn't really a problem in and of itself.  If you want to succeed on TV you have to follow trends unless you're setting trends yourself, and you can't go far wrong if you're copying the practices of the leader in your field.  The relentlessly dark, violent, action-heavy approach to storytelling only became an issue for Star Trek: Discovery because fifty years of Star Trek had been lighthearted, generally non-violent, high-concept intellectual space adventure.  It was massively out of character for the franchise, but not to the point of being unworkable.

Where I think most of the problems came in was with Star Wars: the Force Awakens.  We're in a period where there's a lot of focus on representation for women and minorities in film.  This isn't a bad thing in and of itself either.  Star Trek has always been pretty good about representation thanks to Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future where humanity has put things like superstitions and bigotry in its past.  He created a fictional world where everyone can contribute equally to society because the whole idea that the human race had one group that was "better" or "chosen" had been abandoned as wrong-headed nonsense.  More importantly, the thing that made Star Trek's diverse cast work so well was that they just slipped it in like it was the most natural thing in the world.  They weren't shouting about how diverse the cast was from the rooftops.  With Star Wars: the Force Awakens you suddenly had a huge amount of press coverage about the representation itself, with magazines, news sites, and social media gushing about the movie having a woman and a black man as the main characters.  Even though this would've been fodder for a "That's cute" since that's something Star Trek did back in the 90's, they somehow let themselves get dragged into a game of oneupsmanship.  They were suddenly promoting on the basis of how diverse they were being with a black woman in the lead role, an openly gay couple (after bailing on the idea on three previous occasions¹), an arabic character, etc. 

The problem you run into when you do that is it ties your hands when you're writing, because you've made the character's minority category a fundamental part of their identity from the perspective of the audience.  You're suddenly constrained by this no-win scenario where anything you do with that one character is going to be relentlessly judged as a reflection of your views of whatever minority they're representing.  A character who's been advertised on the basis of representation like Michael Burnham ends up with an omniscient morality license as you can't have them face realistic consequences for extreme actions because people will insist the character is being picked on for their minority category.  Look at what happened with Dr. Culber... he got killed because he stupidly was alone in a sickbay suite treating a man believed to be mentally ill who was a Klingon sleeper agent, and a fair chunk of the audience was baying for the producers blood and accusing them of killing him off for being gay.  The writers are forced to do all kinds of ridiculous mental calisthenics in the plot to dance around the fact that, as a main character and a representation character, Burnham cannot be depicted in the wrong or having a moment of weakness except on rare occasions because more frequent occurrences would be courting accusations of racism and/or sexism from the audience.  A protagonist who isn't allowed to be wrong can't grow and develop as the story progresses, so Burnham comes off as a Mary Sue.

(This is made especially weird by a very un-Star Trek-like number of category stereotypes in the cast... Burnham is a stock sassy black woman from a broken family AND an ex-convict, Stamets is one effeminate lisp short of being stock catty gay man, Lorca turned out to be one red hat short of a stereotypical racist white nationalist complete with the expected unreasonably huge gun collection, Ash Tyler is a foreign terrorist motivated by his fundamentalist religious beliefs who happens to be disguised as an Arabic man, and Mirror!Georgeau was a cookie cutter standard evil authoritarian Chinese character complete and femme fatale with the expected catsuit, sexual promiscuity, and catty behavior.  It's like they picked as many offensive stereotypes as possible hoping they would cancel each other out.)

Lastly, Star Trek: Discovery picked up the over-the-top set design and obsession with VFX sequences that plagued the J.J. Abrams reboot Star Trek films.  A setting that was always fairly low key and almost realistic with its future tech is suddenly infested with a ton of impossibly compact folding gadgets that unfold with eleventy-billion moving parts, huge holographic displays, lights which seem calibrated solely to produce lensflares, miles of exposed piping and storage tanks with no apparent purpose, an excess of polished metal surfaces, and conspicuous noisemakers.  The aesthetics borrowed from the reboot movies just don't fit with the historical period the show is set in, and vary between being silly and just plain distracting.  Paradoxically, the one thing that they included that absolutely deserved a big, complex visual effect - the Spore Drive - ended up as a surprisingly low key plexiglass cubicle with an ugly posture chair in it.

 

 

Put all that crap together, and what you've got is an ungainly mess that even experienced writers would've struggled with.

 

1. First with Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then Lt. Hawk in Star Trek: First Contact, and finally Malcolm Reed in Star Trek: Enterprise.  Lt. Hawk's orphaned plot thread got picked up in the relaunch novels, at least, where his former lover ends up assigned to Riker's USS Titan.

Edited March 30, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[Seto Kaiba]

CBS All Access just dropped the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery... "Through the Valley of Shadows".

 

Spoiler

So, Mama Burnham's "time crystal" got blown up by robo-Leland and she's now stuck in 3186 so we don't have to listen to her being a walking plot hole anymore (thank the great bird of the galaxy for small favors).

Spock apparently phoned his mommy immediately thereafter to fill her in on all the latest USS Discovery gossip about Control, which strikes me as both inherently hilarious (I like to think he worked out a lot of issues by killing Burnham) and rather dumb considering the Discovery is currently a wanted renegade ship being hounded by Section 31.  Michael Burnham, meanwhile, is back to being the rude, unprofessional hot mess she was in season one and once again everyone is just sort of overlooking it or taking it in stride.  Saru, at least, is willing to be the voice of reason and implicitly point out that, for a woman who grew up on Vulcan she's surprisingly bad at logical thinking.  Christopher Pike has the patience of a saint, and every time this kind of thing happens my respect for the man increases fractionally.  He wasn't a swashbuckling space cowboy like Kirk, he must've been an amazing diplomat given how in control of his emotions he is all the time.

Anyhoo, they're off to Boreth, the planet orbiting the star Kahless the Unforgettable indicated he would return on (and later did, via cloning), where the latest red signal has occurred and where Voq!Tyler and LRell sent their albino child whom many fans of Star Trek believe will grow up to be Kang, Kor, and Koloth's sworn enemy "The Albino" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It's a little worrying that Tyler is apparently getting realtime Section 31 status updates on a PADD he keeps in his quarters in an unlocked cabinet.  PADDs are networked devices, aren't they?  Section 31's communications network was managed by its Control AI, so wouldn't that give Control a backdoor into Discovery's main computer?  A Section 31 ship misses its check-in and every agent is immediately notified?

OH MY GOD the D7-class CG model for this episode is GORGEOUS.  Every bit as lovely as the Constitution-class CG model from the season one finale.  The more utilitarian Crossfield-class USS Discovery actually looks weirdly under-detailed next to it despite the D7-class's relatively sparse and TOS-like aesthetic.

Apart from being the site of a monastery where the most devout monks live, Boreth is also apparently the Klingon Empire's source of "time crystals".  LRell also manages to reveal that the Klingons are shockingly genre savvy about time travel and how stupidly dangerous it is, and willingly put an end to their own research into time manipulation rather than risk a major temporal mishap.  This also puts the Klingon reaction to the Burnhams stealing a time crystal into perspective... they had staged a raid on a religious site to steal a weapon that only a reckless moron would want, which puts a third new spin on Burnham's past and makes the Burnhams the bad guys who were killed by law enforcement during a raid to confiscate a banned weapon of mass destruction.

Saru, in the mean time, displays some amazingly poor judgement in letting someone he knews is a loose cannon and very much emotionally compromised go charging off to pursue the Section 31 ship that was ten minutes late checking in.  Did he not learn anything from the last dozen times someone let her run off unchecked?  It's a bit of a nice touch that we're seeing more non-human crewmembers in the corridor scenes though.  A couple Tellarites are visible in the background of this shot.

The monastery at Boreth clearly has the same architects as Darth Vader's summer house on Mustafar... good grief, talk about No OHSA Compliance.  What kind of nut installs a bridge over a river of lava with no handrails?  Gotta hand it to the guards in the monastery though, they've got a nice aesthetic and they are pretty damn intimidating-looking.  The head monk is definitely one of those chaps old enough to know that speaking a threat in a normal tone of voice can sound way more menacing than shouting one too, so he does some credible tension-building.

OK, never mind, Saru is a master troll.  He allowed Burnham to go charging off and sent Spock to hold her leash and piss her off.  There is hope for this Kelpian yet, and he's consistently one of the characters I like best.  Spock himself is a real treat too given how much sass he displays for a Vulcan.  

JETT RENO IS BACK!  She brought the attitude too, which is nice.  Apparently the cranky engineer has been mixing well with the rest of the crew, considering she immediately engages them (including the Saurian) in wordplay games over lunch and has apparently given some of them nicknames.  The banter they get in that scene is really better character building than what the main characters are getting half the time, and really makes them feel like a crew rather than just background decorations for Burnham's story.  We really need more of this and of them.

The Albino rumors look to be jossed though... apparently the head monk IS Voq and LRell's son, Tenavik.  Apparently being around a crystallized timey-wimey ball all day long is bad for the linear progress of time.

What is this show's fetish with beaming people into space unprotected?  Seriously.  The Mirror Universe was obsessed with it, and now Control apparently is too... it's spacing the crews of entire ships.  Burnham is lucky enough to find a survivor, who is conveniently a former USS Shenzhou crewman who knew Burnham personally.  He apparently tried to purge a suspicious bit of software from his ship and the ship reacted by spacing the entire crew, so of course Burnham wants to go over there and investigate.

Tyler and LRell get to have a nice character moment together while Pike is busy planetside.  Thiss show really does need to have more of this and less action.  Star Trek always was a character-focused series.

Pike touches a time crystal at Tenavik's instruction, and we get to see the famous training accident that left him a cripple in the original Star Trek series followed by Pike confronting himself in the life support chair.  They kept the largely minimalist design of the chair, which is niec, and only marginally modified it to make a little more futuristic looking.  The breathing noise they use is REALLY sickeningly unhealthy-sounding, which drives home what a mess he's become.  Pike gets to show us a little bit of that Starfleet commitment to doing the right thing and self-sacrifice that is so sorely lacking from the series and refuses to walk away from the horrors awaiting him by refusing to take the crystal.  As much as it's played for horror, it does Pike considerable credit to see him exert that kind of commitment to a better future even if he won't be able to enjoy it.

Burnham, meanwhile, immediately f*cks up.

Jett Reno, on the other hand, continues to be a goddamn treasure.  Like McCoy and Scotty rolled into one, she shows up in Sickbay to give Culber a "What the hell, hero?"  That, apparently, makes three gay characters on Discovery too, as Jett Reno apparently is married to a Soyousian who is every bit as anal as Stamets.  They get another fun Reno moment bonding over spousal horror stories before they get to the Aestop about how stupidly lucky Culber is getting a second chance (her wife died in the war, apparently).

Burnham, Gant, and Spock give us a bit of earnest treknobabble on the Section 31 ship in their effort to regain control of it from... er... Control.  I'm increasingly thinking the Control plot explains why the Enterprise ten years hence looks much more primitive.  This kind of networked control system makes it too easy to hijack an entire ship from a single point of entry, like the Romulans did with a computer virus in the Enterprise relaunch novels.  There's a stupid obvious twist that Gant has also been compromised by Control the way Leland was, and the whole thing was a trap.  Somehow, it never occurred to them to scan for nanotech in Gant's body after he suspiciously was the only person in an EV suit.  At this point, Burnham is so obviously too dumb to live that I'm rooting for Control.  We get ANOTHER affirmation that Burnham is a Mary Sue, since Control believes she's the only one who stop it.  Control's nanobot swarms are a really cheap, shitty looking effect... it's less Borg assimilation and more just a nanobot swarm wearing a meat jacket.

We get another really good moment between a traumatized Pike, who shares a message from Tenavik to his parents, LRell and Voq/Tyler.  

Section 31's entire fleet shows up to try and seize the sphere data from Discovery and the crew finally realize they can keep that data out of Control's grasp by just blowing up their damn ship.  You have to wonder why it never occurred to them to just physically remove the portion of memory containng the data and vaporizing that.

 

All in all, great B and C plots that feel like real Star Trek... and the crappy Burnham-centric A-plot continues to circle the drain and get dumber all the time.

Next episode looks to be headed into action-heavy territory, as the teaser consists entirely of the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise preparing for a battle against Section 31's fleet.

This, at least, goes a small way towards explaining why Section 31 was forgotten by Picard's time... it was destroyed by Control, much like it was repeatedly destroyed and refounded by Control in the relaunch novel series.

Edited April 5, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[UN Spacy]

LOVED tonight’s episode. We’ve always heard what happened to Pike, but to finally see it unfold like that was intense. Shame to hear Mount won’t be back for next season. Pretty excited for these last two episodes.